Land use change is currently the largest threat to biodiversity, and exacerbates the detrimental effects of climate change. We are interested in novel types of land use change, such as housing growth in the WUI, and widespread land abandonment after socioeconomic shocks, and how such changes affect biodiversity.
What are the underlying drivers of land degradation in the Caucasus Mountains? Katarzyna Ewa Lewinska hopes to sort out part of this complex problem through remote sensing-based analysis.
What happens to croplands/forests during political instability? Johanna Buchner’s work in the Caucasus shows that change is dependent on local conditions, and not similar across broad scales.
He Yin wants to increase precision in quantifying land abandonment across a diversity of biomes and complex crop systems.
